Category: Data Visualization

Ok, this won’t take too long to sink your teeth into why the Dasheroo Push API might be just the thing you need to keep track of ALL of your KPIs in one dashboard.

And if you’re a Dasheroo user we know you love using Dasheroo to connect to the dozens of apps we integrate with. But we know you might have other custom data that you also need to have visibility into on your dashboard. If so, the Dasheroo Push API can help out.

Push API is a powerful way to connect any internal data to Dasheroo and convert your data into useful visualizations on your dashboard right alongside all of the other KPIs you’re tracking from Google Analytics, Facebook and perhaps Shopify!

So for instance you might want to track KPIs for:

Your internal sales system so you can see how any social media is working to drive sales

Your internal sales system so you can see if there are any discrepancies with your PayPal, Shopify, or Stripe sales.

Your number of new customers from your internal systems

Error tracking on your website or database

On top of this you want your stats updated FAST and furiously. And you can have your KPIs updated new (starting from 0) each day or have them continuously updated. Cool huh?

Currently Dasheroo has users users who’ve created dashboards that combine Push API insights with a selection of over 500 current insights we offer from 35 applications. But we also have users who’ve created Push API-only dashboards and are using Dasheroo as a pure visualization tool. Obviously we’re happy to support any and all users!

Setting up the Push API for your business is simple; all you need to do is send the data you want to visualize to a unique URL provided by Dasheroo and we will take care of the rest.

We’re heads down here at Dasheroo with testing on our next release and it’s not without difficulty. New Insights for Facebook Ads and Google Adwords are giving us a bit of a headache…Advil to the rescue!

Changes Abound at Instagram

Instagram has changed their API policies which is giving a lot of companies like ours yet another headache. As a result they’ve taken back some of the data they have been providing to us. For this reason we are not allowed to offer the Instagram competitive insight which affects about 500 of our users. Sorry, we still have some great Instagram stats you can’t get for free at companies like Iconosquare!

Faster Updates to Your Dashboards

Some of our users have experienced stats updating a bit slow. We’ve identified the issue and over the course of the next few weeks we’ll be increasing throughput just a bit each day so we can monitor any scalability issues.

Zapier Makes Dasheroo Happier

Since we re-launched our Zapier integration with more data visualizations we not only are getting a huge spike of users using the Zapier integration and we HAD OUR BIGGEST DAY OF USERS EVER, but we also have a huge spike using our native integrations as well, pretty cool, I’d say. Thanks for the love Zapier! Alf our VP of Customer Success has been VERY busy needless to say.

Oh, why use Zapier? Look, we get hundreds of requests to integrate with different 3rd party applications and while we want to do every one of them, it’s simply not possible. BUT, Zapier has integrated with a TON of 3rd party applications and they make it very easy for you to use them to integrate your data from hundreds of apps right into your Dasheroo dashboard. So give it a whirl!

All companies have a ton of data and it’s all over the place. I mean we created Dasheroo because of that very problem. Access to data in Facebook is different from Twitter is different from Google Analytics and the list goes on. One of the benefits of Dasheroo is the art of visualizing that data in the same format so you can really compare apples to apples and know what you’re looking at.

Good to know we had just one bad day, then it’s all smooth!

But we’ve seen a very large chunk of people lately using us to get access to internal data that they’ve never been able to see. Huh? I mean we thought that folks would have their data in a spreadsheet and for that we pull data from Google Sheets. But internal data was an interesting one. We built it from the start (thanks James!) but the usage of the product has been a) going through the roof and b) being asked for by huge companies you’d be surprised by.

Think about it, you’re probably in a company where your CFO or head of finance/accounting has access to some great data that might help you market, sell and make better decision with. Conversely if you are the head of finance you might want an easy way a) to get data to the masses (so they’ll quit buggin’ ya) and b) to see what marketing is spending money on and sales are closing.

With access to a custom data dashboard you can view things like:

When specific sales or legal contracts are expiring –

How many people buy product a and b together, how many don’t

How many errors you’re getting on your website

How many people are signing up or logging into your online product

How many users are churning out (canceling their account)

So here’s what you’ll need: 1 web developer + a web server + 15 minutes of time. Then POOF, you’ll have your data on your dashboard continuously updated! Watch this short video and show them this extremely short documentation!

We always like to share with you when Dasheroo gets some great ink for our awesome dashboards, and just recently we had four great companies talking about Dasheroo, from marketing tools to marketing blogs! Thanks guys!

We love it when our users take the time to give us real feedback both positive and negative for our business dashboards. So we asked Daniel Codella over at Zurb to answer some questions for us.

Zurb is a pretty cool company based here in the Bay Area. According to Zurb, “ZURB is a product design company since 1998. Through consulting, product design tools and training, we transform the way businesses approach product design.”

Thanks for taking the time Daniel!

How many employees work at Zurb?

Daniel: There’s about 25 of us, including contractors here at ZURB. We’re broken up into four business groups and multiple teams. I’m ZURB’s sole marketer and a member of our Connections team, responsible for building relationships, increasing communication and putting people first!

That’s awesome! What did you use before you found Dasheroo? How long did it take you to gather your metrics?

Daniel: Ugh. Before Dasheroo? That was painful! I would often create custom dashboards using Google Docs and Google Analytics. While you can do some very cool things there, it was difficult for me and I’d often mess them up. I explored a few other business dashboard apps and services but I found them either to be too difficult or not flexible enough. As hard as a I tried, I just couldn’t find that one product that showed me all the metrics that were important to me in an easy to use way.

Building and managing these custom dashboards and updating my docs really started to get time consuming and took me away from my actual work. I would spend several hours a week gathering, organizing and presenting the data, hours I could have spent actually doing my job to make those numbers move.

What were the most important features you needed in a dashboard for Zurb?

Daniel: In addition to all of the big health indicators of our popular marketing channels, I needed to be able to easily and quickly see my email metrics to look for patterns, correlations, and other insights. I also needed to compare all of these KPIs with some custom numbers I keep in Google Sheets. All of these streams of data needed to be easy to compare and analyze so I could break down the information for my team and ultimately act on the data.

Did you gain any new insight using Dasheroo?

Daniel: Absolutely. To easily see patterns and trends, to be able to spot correlations at a glance, all of this was previously unavailable to me but has fundamentally changed my tactics and strategies. I can act quickly to maintain momentum but also observe longterm movement and respond appropriately. Because Dasheroo integrates with just about anything, I can compare all kinds of data, even the special custom stuff I keep in my docs. On top of that, the charts and graphs it generates are beautiful and add some really pizazz to my reports and presentations. Accurate data is most important of course, but the added perk of having that data displayed in such a vivd way helps me convey things to the team in a way they can really understand. The more members of my team that have access to and understand the data, the better decisions we can make as a company.

Does more than one team member use Dasheroo? What other functions in the company?

Daniel: Two of our “Customer Advocates” use Dasheroo to gather data on how people are using our various products and services. We also regularly share Dasheroo graphs and charts with company leadership and at our weekly scrums.

Thomas Suh Lauder over at the LA Times posted this amazing data visualization on how each district in California is utilizing our precious water. the Governor wants to cut water usage by 25% by 2016. Maybe those people who live next to us will finally stop pressure washing their building!!!

Anyhoo, we put our own zip code in the field and turns out that in comparison here in SF we’re not doing too bad (always could be better). Each resident of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission used, on average, 44 gallons of water a day.

When we looked at nearby areas:

When you compare that to the zips that use the least and the most? Santa Fe District just gets too dang hot!

Since we’re data geeks here at Dasheroo we search out the best of the Web to find some great data visualizations for you and thanks to Flowingdata (we go to these gurus first to find our great examples of dataviz done right!) they pointed out that the New York Times had a great post about the 2016 Presidential candidates and when they entered the race. They also go on to show by days gone by who the winning candidates were and when they entered the race based on how many weeks were left.

The killer here is that this election cycle has the most candidates expected to run ever. Sixteen in total while the left has a mere 5. What’s up with that? Well it’s more than when Gore ran against just one competitor in 2000.

Thanks Flowing Data for bringing us the awesome interactive dataviz from Lewis Lehe, PhD candidate in transportation engineering, that answers a city-dwellers age-old question: why the hell do buses bunch up at a stop?

Lorena Elebee over at the LA Times did a pretty cool data visualization that shows over the past 3 months that El Niño might just be cooking up a bit (which we like!) Click to check out all three months.